Some philosophers are known for holding counterintuitive views on important issues like the nature of reality. A perfect example of this is George Berkeley. He is known, rather notoriously, for denying the existence of matter, also known as corporeal substance. In James Boswell’s Life of Johnson there is a humorous anecdote making fun of said belief, as the great Dr. Samuel Johnson kicks a stone in order to refute his point. More seriously, the issues his philosophy brings up are quite difficult to tackle. However, in the reader-friendly Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Berkeley presents several of his ideas in an engaging format. Years later, however, German philosopher Immanuel Kant came up with his own system designed to oppose the “dogmatic idealism” represented by figures like Berkeley. Unfortunately for Kant, however, his ideas were in fact seen as supporting Berkeley. But, as we shall see, Berkeley and Kant cannot be reconciled. The latter’s transcendental idealism is both fundamentally different as well as too much to handle for defenders of Berkeley.
Before comparing Berkeley’s idealist philosophy with Kant’s transcendental idealism, it is necessary to present the former’s arguments for believing that only minds and their ideas, unlike material substrates, can possibly exist. This, it must be noted, entails that to exist is to be perceived, or esse est percipi. It follows because if only minds with ideas exist, then there cannot exist anything that is not perceived, since every idea belongs to some mind. And since these ideas are mind-dependent, nothing we perceive is external in the sense that it contains a chunk of matter that underlies it. Rather, what we perceive are intertwined bundles of qualities. An easy way to visualize some of these brief remarks is by imagining what would happen if stripping X object of every quality it possessed. Would there be nothing left at some point? If you believe there would not be anything else, you approach things in a Berkelian manner. Others, however, will obviously disagree. A startling consequence of Berkeley’s thinking is that appearances become all there is—i.e. there is no such thing as an underlying “thing-in-itself.” To hold such a view entails expecting opponents. Berkeley’s challenge was to convince those who doubted him.
In his Dialogues, Berkeley offers a number of points in the quest to make converts to the considerably radical “phenomenalistic” ideas described above. For one, he has to demonstrate that what is sensible depends exclusively on what our minds say. One of several ways he attempts this is by positing an argument based on how subjective our opinions are when it comes to something’s qualities. Philonous tells Hylas that “that which at other times seems sweet, shall to a distempered palate appear bitter” (180). This is called the argument from illusion. From this Berkeley believes that we can generalize all sensory qualities such as those mentioned at the beginning of Dialogue I (175: colors, sounds, odors, etc.) as ideas.
But what about those other qualities we generally call “primary” such as number and extension? Surely, it would seem, these do not depend on our minds, but rather are independent of it. Shockingly enough, Berkeley groups them together with the other sensible qualities mentioned above, which are commonly known as secondary qualities. He recycles his same arguments from the earlier parts of Dialogue I. For instance, Berkeley uses the same illusion argument used earlier for motion and solidity (188-191). Collectively these sensory qualities are the only things we can sense.
If ideas are in the mind, then why do we come across “ideas” that oppose our will and seem to belong to an external world? To explain these sorts of ideas (the things we come across with in daily life) Berkeley postulates that they are unfolding in God’s mind. And by making God the existential ground of everything, Berkeley also makes his philosophy theo-centric like Leibniz and Descartes did in their respective ways. As Philonous tells Hylas, “I…immediate and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by him” (212). God becomes an infinite mind and we live in a narrative taking place inside it.
Now that we have gone over the basics of Berkeley’s idealism, it is time to clarify any lingering doubts before moving on to Immanuel Kant. For instance, we have said that if we accept with Berkeley that minds and their ideas are all there is, then there can be no material things in the sense that Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes believed in. But would that mean that there are no things with causal power? The answer is both yes and no, depending on whether we are conceiving of such things in terms of ideas. And again, someone may ask what impact Berkeley has on instruments on measurement. Are they helpful or true in any way? Interpret it as you may, Berkeley would endorse anything that increases our knowledge of the world, and objects like these clearly do. Thus, as we can observe, it is important to know that Berkeley’s project is not to turn all our commonly held beliefs upside down. It is just that from the perspective of the way language is typically used, his theories are hard to swallow. But as mind-loving Philonous says in Berkeley’s place, he is “not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things” (244).
Immanuel Kant, some will say, is extremely similar to Berkeley. Hopefully this hypothesis can be dispelled more easily by looking first at the definition of transcendental idealism before plunging into his ideas in more detail. For one, the word “transcendental” does not come from “transcendent”—and to associate the two is a mistake which can lead to severe misinterpretations. Instead of having to do with that which lies beyond the realm of experience, the transcendental “precedes…all experience” and is “not destined for anything more than solely to make cognition by experience possible” (Kant 373n). As for the “idealism” part, it is necessary to conjoin it with “transcendental,” for otherwise it may be confused for what Kant means simply by “idealism”—which is something he actually opposes. With regards to his “idealism,” we can define its purpose as allowing us to conceive “the possibility of our cognition a priori of the objects of experience” (374n). On the other hand, the other idealism that demarcates the philosophy of Berkeley and others is defined by Kant as holding the belief that there is “none other than thinking beings” (4: 289). This goes to show how careful we must be in interpreting Kant’s terminology. And to sum up what is meant by both terms together as meant by Kant, we can say that transcendental idealism in general asserts that what we can perceive are only representations, not the noumenal world of things-in-themselves. Furthermore, it considers that these representations are fixed into an intuition-based time and space framework in order to give them coherence in our minds.
With the definition of transcendental idealism in mind, as well as Kant’s definition of “idealism,” it is time to turn to the relationship his thought has with the ideas that make up Berkeley’s philosophy. Firstly, we will discuss a very fundamental difference between the two. Berkeley, it is clear, claims that appearances make up what there really is. It is impossible, according to his system, to think otherwise. In contradistinction, Kant obviously does not adhere to that. Appearances, as mentioned earlier, are mere representations of an external (i.e. mind-independent) world which becomes synthesized by our minds in a complex interplay of its faculties. They fall in the realm of experience, while the noumenal world of things-in-themselves does not. Kant writes:
“…I do indeed admit that there are bodies outside us, i.e. things which, although wholly unknown to us, i.e. as to what they may be in themselves, we know through the representations which their influence on our sensibility provides for us, and to which we give the name of bodies.” (Kant 4: 289)
Thus Kant, as seen in the passage, disagrees with a central tenet of Berkeley’s idealism.
Why, one may ask, can we not know anything about the noumenal world which causes our experience? The answer lies in the very question: it causes our experience and is not part of it. We can make truthful and verifiable claims that lie in the realm of what we can sense, but once we venture beyond that, our reason has already reached its boundaries (4:354)—thus making any proofs concerning God, the soul, etc. not conclusively demonstrable. In fact, when philosophizing on difficult and topics such as these, equally valid opposite proofs can be formulated. And the antinomy, as this is called, is referred to by Kant as “the strangest phenomenon of human reason” (4:340). This is important when comparing Kant’s transcendental idealism with Berkeley’s idealism because the latter’s theo-centric philosophy is metaphysically daring, making confident claims about the most mysterious topics and the nature of reality proper. Also worth noting when considering their differences is that Kant believed that if metaphysics were to be possible at all, we would have to be able to make claims about the world that are not found in the world. These are synthetic a priori statements (4:276). Berkeley, on the other hand, denied any a priori knowledge at all, yet still believed metaphysics was possible. This is a result of his empiricism. And what does this tell us? It tells us that despite any appearances to the contrary, there are some powerful differences in the two philosophers’ mode of operation that cannot allow them to reach the same conclusions under any logical circumstances.
Since we have seen why Berkeley and Kant think as they do, it is only right to refresh ourselves and sum up the conclusions of Kant’s transcendental idealism and Berkeley’s phenomenalism in order to make the differences clear so as to be able to judge which is sounder. Berkeley denies a priori knowledge and the existence of matter while accepting the fact that everything we encounter takes place in God’s mind. By positing a system of ideas and minds, appearances become things-in-themselves, or more coherently, things-in-themselves are rejected. On the other hand, Kant believes in the existence of a priori knowledge. In fact, our own notions of time and space are a priori and give the world we experience structure. As such, appearances are mere representations, since we are distorting them, or synthesizing them through our understanding, so that they make sense to us. And, most importantly, our reason is bounded and unable to go beyond these “mere interpretations”—as there is a noumenal world of things-in-themselves. And while it may sound Berkelian to claim that we can only know appearances, by accepting the possibility of a noumenal world any chance of reconciliation between Kant and Berkeley remains impossible. If they could be united in some way, it would have to be by positing Kant’s transcendental idealism as a rationalistic version of Berkeley’s idealism (which, of course, does not reconcile them). It would have to be rationalistic because the role of the a priori is too important to dismiss in Kant’s system, as it is what makes metaphysics possible.
So who holds the sounder position? It would seem that Kant has the edge, as tabula rasa beliefs about our minds do not seem to be supported today, since our brains are seen as having modules for certain things and as being hardwired to act in certain ways. But speaking from a more philosophical perspective, there is a problem in accepting Berkeley’s claim that to exist is to be perceived. As Kant points out in his Critique of Pure Reason, some things may be too small to be perceived. On Berkeley’s grounds, it would seem as if we have to deem these things as inexistent. Yet that, surely, is nonsensical. Furthermore, it seems as if there appears to be no truly defensible way to demonstrate that other human minds exist if we use Berkeley’s philosophy, as he seems to believe there are. Also in favor of Kant, there is the advantage that his philosophy has in assuring me of the presence of external things. Whereas with Berkeley I need to have faith that what I am seeing is real, with Kant I need only know that since I am deploying my mental faculties in producing a representation, there must be something external to me. This, in turn, ratifies that I am a self with an identity, going even beyond Descartes’ cogito.
WORKS CITED
Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. Trans. Peter Lucas and Günter
Zöller. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
